Goodbye, GitHub

GitHub has scored an own goal this week by automatically opting in GitHub Copilot users (free and paid, except enterprise) to train their models based on Copilot “interaction data”.

Another example of AI-fever causing companies to make stupid decisions.

Unsurprisingly, there is widespread outrage at this.

Like many others, I’ve already been pissed off at them and others for training LLMs on open source data, breaking the social contract of open source software even if not a legal one.

When I went to disable the offending toggle, I found 8 other settings that I couldn’t disable. Way to be hostile to users, GitHub.

I rarely use non-git features of GitHub, it is mainly a web UI for me. This also makes it less sticky.

Using Claude Code and the GitHub/GitLab CLIs, it took me all of 15 minutes to whittle down the ~200 repositories I had built up over the past 13 years to 36 that I wanted to keep, and move them over to GitLab.

The goal is to start using self-hosted Forgejo - it’s a lightweight open source Git forge that’s run by a community-owned non-profit.